His book Sustainable Transportation Planning provides the context for understanding the current built environment and how to change it (it’s not just a planning manual, it’s a set of tools to help people work better with planners).

His book Walking Home frames the discussion as a journey from the suburbs we built back to the dense urban environments people are rediscovering, and that are best for humans.

W.H. Whyte has never spoken in Ottawa, because, well, he’s dead.

His book City, from 1988, is a fantastic exploration of how public space is actually used, and of how people actually experience the urban landscape.

W.H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl are all intensely scientific in their approach to the city: they observe, they measure. This is quite different from the modernist and brutalist approach, which asserted and imposed.